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Tag: psychology

Around the Web

I’ve been living in Boston (or Cambridge to be more precise) for the past few months and it has been good so far. Boston is a quite attractive place to live, with all the universities and the museums, architecture and open spaces. Though there are certain deficiencies to my life here (I haven’t built a solid social circle yet), as this article says, being within easy rich of various forms of beauty has been quite enjoyable.

Since sitting down and actually reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra a few years, I have been a fan of Nietzsche (and one day I should really sit down and read all of his work). And over the years I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the intellectual webs that writers and thinkers find themselves embedded in (in no small part due to reading Brain Pickings). So of course I found this interview of Sue Prideaux about her forthcoming biography of Nietzsche very interesting. It’s only about Nietzsche, but situates his work in the context of his life and the people he knew and communicated with.

Talking of things I have become interested in during the last few years, I have been increasingly concerned about how “work” and “productivity” should be situated in the broader frame of our lives. Of course, this is well-trod ground and in this case we get to see Hannah Arendt’s footsteps in this region as she ties together notions of work, labor, creation, consumption and humanity’s connection to the “metabolism of nature”. Hopefully a thought-provoking read on a Sunday afternoon before starting the workweek anew.

Around the Web

I’ve never used the Ghost platform, and though I’m still on WordPress, I’ve become a fan of more programmable publishing platforms lately. But this was still a very interesting read, and it was particularly heartening to see that the people involved had put their money where there mouth is and made the company behind Ghost a non-profit foundation. On the other hand, it was disheartening to read about GitHub’s negative influence on open source, and how hard it continues to be to fund good journalism, especially when we need it the most.

Grit has been the subject of much psychology research, TED talks, and I suspect pop-sci books in the last few decades. But much of the work appears to be focused on the self-discipline component of grit, whereas Angela Duckworth’s original definition of grit includes both self-discipline and passion. This articles makes a case for why the passion component is so important and points to recent studies that are looking at it.

I’ve never done well with hobbies. I played violin for a few years, and loved to draw as a kid. I haven’t kept up with either of them, probably in part because I started taking formal classes in both of them, and I quickly felt like I had to do well in the classes, rather than enjoying the activity itself. I’m only starting to unlearn those lessons and trying to come to terms with being only mediocre at some things.

Around the Web

There is said to be a Roman tradition where a victorious Roman general would parade through the streets of Rome and as he did so a servant would whisper in his ear: Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!”—“Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!” We don’t have Roman generals parading through the streets anymore, but we do have talented writers reflecting on their impending deaths in the context of their lives.

While the anti-vaccination “movement” has gotten a lot of press recently, there are other kinds of drugs administered to children that can significantly impact their lives. This piece traces the author’s use of anti-depressants from a young age and discusses how it affected her life and her growth as a person.

From the “truth is stranger than fiction” section: “A new study showcases the first example of an animal editing its own genetic makeup on-the-fly to modify most of its proteins, enabling adjustments to its immediate surroundings.”

From the Bookshelf

As someone approaching the tail end of their twenties, a book with the tagline “Why your twenties matter and how to make the most of them now” sounds like something I should have read five years ago. Oh well, better late than never I suppose. In this book, psychologist Dr. Meg Jay explores psychology, neuroscience, sociology and economics to make a compelling case for why the twenties can be an important time for growth and development and explains how the choices made (or not made) then can affect the rest of our lives. She combines personal anecdotes, interviews with numerous twenty-somethings and a host of solid evidence to write a narrative that is often hopeful, sometimes scary, but always compelling.

Video

I spent the better part of an hour today learning about QNX—a real-time operating system first developed in the 80s that sports a practical microkernel architecture, a POSIX API and forms the core of a multitude of high-availability software (including the BlackBerry 10 OS, various car software and runs Cisco IOS devices). Best of all, it fits on an old-school floppy disk, complete with GUI and a web browser. QNX represents a great technical achievement and an interesting part of computer history.